


Anherchists

by scioscribe



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 09:48:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instead of going to Greendale, Britta starts an anarchist collective farm.  Everyone still winds up tangled in each other's lives, just with more baking, less makeup, and a fair amount of agriculture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anherchists

**Author's Note:**

> The first part of a series of AUs where someone else in the Greendale Seven takes charge of the group. (This later turned out to be--not so much part of a series, so I've deleted that tag to avoid confusion.)
> 
> I've been flexible here with "Heroic Origins" and canon generally.
> 
> EDIT: Description continuity error was made between drafts and is now fixed.

Like half of Britta’s problems, it started with a rich old white guy.

It happened like this:

A local paper picked up the first and last hurrah of Britta’s anarchist collective. The reporter was a teensy-weensy bit of a cocaine addict and so ducked out to the bathroom early and didn’t notice that all the Anherchists except Britta were patriarchy-loving animal-eaters who totally bailed on her, so the article went out and made it sound like she was the head of a thriving countercultural, like, _movement_. Then some international corporate pig, the scion of a moist wipes dynasty, decided that clubs for women were best used to pummel his daddy issues to death and dipped into his old Lilith Fair donation pool to give Britta and her now-defunct group of freedom-loving she-roes a small working farm in the hills of Greendale county.

Boom.

Because she didn’t have _enough_ problems, now she was joined at the hip to a capitalist landowner.

*

Pierce Hawthorne also bequeathed her a lawyer, some over-gelled douchecanoe with appealing musculature named Jeff.

“He’s not dead or anything,” Jeff said. “He just likes saying ‘bequeathed.’ Anyway, you’ll have a better shot establishing tax-exempt nonprofit status with an actual organization, so you might want to, I don’t know, drug some hippies or something, convince them it’s still the sixties.”

“You know what people like you always want to do?” Britta said.

“Solve problems with logic, common sense, and unmistakable panache?”

“Relegate meaningful social change to the past.”

He blinked. “You know,” he said, “every now and then, you come up with something that almost makes me think purple hair isn’t a disqualifier for actual thought.”

“Oh, your condescension means the world to me.” She’d been thinking about washing the violet out anyway. Britta had never understood how people made choices between the things that mattered, between meaningful personal changes expressed through aesthetics and naturalism in a world that encouraged women to look any other way than how they did already. Britta chose everything all at once, which was why she didn’t quite want to be tax-exempt, because libraries, roads, stuff like that, in addition to the government war machine. But she did miss having company that wasn’t Jeff.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll do what people in power have always done. I’ll find some gullible young women.”

Jeff recommended the mall.

*

That was how Britta met Annie.

“I don’t know,” Annie said. “I like to keep my political affiliations sort of—low-key and non-controversial.”

“Yeah,” Britta said. She’d fueled her mall campaigning with a lunchtime swing by the Red Door and was feeling liquored-up and slick, like a Winger with a social conscience and an ill thought-out tattoo of a monarch butterfly. “There’s not really any reason to focus on the patriarchy anymore. I mean, it sounds silly, right? And a little _extremist_. What do you do, Annie? You’re in college, right?”

Annie twirled her hair around her finger. “Community college. I go to Greendale.”

“Oh, yeah, I used to see the commercials.” Mostly on late nights, mostly while high. She had sex dreams afterwards about Luis Guzman. “How’d you pick it?”

Annie was the kind of girl who would take a straightforward question and use it like a knife to cut herself to the bone. Britta was a hall of mirrors; Annie was broken glass. Not that those two things weren’t close enough for Britta to have taken one look at her and know exactly how she worked.

“I had… kind of an Adderall problem in high school. I mean, I was valedictorian. And salutatorian under a version of my name that got entered in by mistake as a typo. Different initial, two points off in grade point average. And I was on the cheerleading squad. And the interfaith alliance. And the—I just ended up getting a little overwhelmed.”

“Well, I’m sure the pressure to succeed affected everyone equally. I mean, I’m sure your high school quarterback was at the top of the class, too.”

“…No, not _exactly_ , but he was really good at, um, he was really—”

“And the cheerleaders didn’t have unrealistic beauty standards forced on them that made you feel bad about yourself.”

“I have to straighten my hair every morning!”

“Oh, that too?”

Annie’s hands went rigid at her side, her fingers white-knuckling around the drawstring of her Gap bag. She’d already shown Britta what was in it: two tasteful but boldly colored cardigans. It was the color that made Britta think that Annie was who she wanted. It was the hint of _I-do-what-I-want_ , the pretty little _fuck-you_ with pearl buttons. Now Annie was earning those colors.

“I had to do everything _twice as good_ , and _twice as hard_ , and _twice as much_ , just to get half the attention and a _quarter_ of the respect! And my parents still talk more about my cousin _Derek_ , who never took a pill in his life, because, oh, yeah, no one ever said _he_ had to be smart _and_ pretty, _JUST PRETTY_. He’s got highlights. He actually pulls them off.”

“But the world still won’t give you any favors, will it, Annie? You lost your chance at a university. Nothing but Greendale for you now. I’m sure it’s fine, because I’m sure the systems that pushed George W. Bush through Harvard and Yale are really invested in funding local education for self-starters like you.”

Annie whispered, “My Spanish teacher turned out to not know Spanish.”

“I have a farm,” Britta said. “Just a cool place for women to hang out and live if they want. You should come out sometime.”

*

Annie came out. Within two months, she had gotten agricultural textbooks through interlibrary loan and started turning the farm—which Britta had thought of as something authentic but ultimately impractical—into something that would, like clockwork, have what she insisted on calling a _yield_ , season after season. She got her hands dirty. She learned about planting soybeans to refresh the earth between cycles.

Britta stuck with flowers. She grew them to be deliberately ugly, deliberately thorny, and in the evening, she ate Annie’s strawberry rhubarb pie and thought about the way the bite of the rhubarb gave over to the sweet. She started growing mums, too. They were hardy.

Annie stopped straightening her hair. It grew into a delicate, hazy frizz around her that fluffed out on the damp mornings she spent surveying their little patch of earth.

“Do we grow enough to live off it?” Britta asked hopefully.

Annie wiped sweat off her forehead. “Oh, no. Um. Not remotely. It’s not really a very big farm, and I’m one person, and we don’t really have any equipment—you know how agriculture works, right?”

“Small farmers are going out of business all across America.”

Annie nodded encouragingly, as if there were more Britta would go on to say, if she were given enough silence. She didn’t know anything about farmers. Sometimes, around Annie, she felt like she didn’t know anything about anything, except proper condom use, Radiohead lyrics, and where to get high-quality fake ID. She rallied: she’d known people in New York who had grown rooftop gardens and had always given her dinners that never quite filled her up, since they were half arugula and half unpronounceable cheeses with fig jam. Britta had grown up on Hamburger Helper and frozen waffles. She didn’t even see a Whole Foods until she was eighteen.

But she could pretend, even if the Anherchists were supposed to be an oasis away from pretending. But it turned out she could run her whole life and never really make it away form her problems.

“We can sell things at a farmer’s market,” she said, like she was continuing what they’d been talking about before, like Annie wouldn’t notice. “We can eat whatever we want from here and earn a little extra on the side from selling things in town. We wouldn’t be so dependent on the Hawthorne Wipes money.”

Annie nodded and said it was a good idea, and then she said, almost shyly, “I can teach you a little bit about what I’m doing out here, if you want to know,” and Britta found, with a weird, squirmy, warm feeling in her stomach, that she sort of _did_ want to know, and that it wouldn’t kill her to say so.

It turned out she knew more than she thought. Farming was gardening on a larger and more complicated scale.

Britta blossomed.

*

“Two people isn’t a commune,” Jeff said.

“ _Sha_ ,” Britta said. “I’m going to get more.”

She had learned, over the last few months, that Jeff never ate anything directly offered to him. Britta had refrained from talking about body image issues affecting men, too, and this time, just put a slice of fresh and chilled strawberry pie on the table, complete with fork. Jeff ate absently. There was a smear of pink on his upper lip, like someone had kissed him.

Britta felt victorious. When he was gone, she did a little dance, and then went to find Annie to tell her they were going recruiting.

*

They found Shirley, a recently divorced mother of two who had been in Annie’s Spanish class. She was also _super_ Christian, like, favorite book on Facebook is the _Bible_ Christian. She was Annie’s choice, not Britta’s. Britta said: “Too saccharine sweet, everything’s so _nice_.” Annie said: “Trust me, Britta, I know anger when I see it, okay? I had that look on my face all through high school.”

Shirley shakes her head no, though. Bunch of white people living on a farm in the middle of nowhere? No thank you—she knew how that story ended and there was always Kool-Aid, some kind of perversion of refreshments.

“It’s a working farm,” Annie said. “We go to farmer’s markets. We make pies. It’s a legitimate life choice!”

“Running away from life isn’t much of a choice.”

“It isn’t running away,” Britta said, even though she would have been the first one to call it that, at least in her head, when she’d done it, when she’d used the farm and its charity bundle as a parachute to give her a soft—and isolated—place to land, where she wouldn’t have to deal with anybody but the occasional sleazebag lawyer. But she had dirt underneath her nails now and her arms weren’t as soft as they’d been. She knew about irrigation. She’d run _to_ something, not away from it. “It’s about getting somewhere quiet for a change to figure out who you are. Everywhere else, someone else decides that for you.”

“You’re someone’s wife,” Shirley said quietly, “and then you’re not.”

“I was someone’s daughter,” Annie said, “until I was too much trouble to be anybody’s anything.”

“I want to go into business,” Shirley said, looking directly at Britta. For the first time since they’d started talking, Britta could see what Annie had meant. There was a core of steel to Shirley, a core of hard, implacable self-determination, that was _pissed_ about how her world had changed on her. She was strong kindness, not soft kindness. She wasn’t inherently sweet. She was a woman who had chosen sweetness deliberately, rhubarb that had gotten itself baked into strawberry pie of its own volition, to be what it thought would be better. But rhubarb so tart it would hurt your mouth if it wanted.

Shirley wouldn’t have any trouble saying she didn’t know about farming; Shirley would just put her head down and learn.

“I don’t know about what all else you have going on. Marijuana, probably.”

How had she not thought of that? They should _totally grow marijuana_. They had the acreage! They had the isolation! They had the morally ambiguous lawyer!

“But what you say about quiet—that sounds nice. And I can bake. I don’t want to step out of the world. You people can afford to do that, but I can’t. But I could come on the weekends, help you bake, take a cut of the proceeds, maybe bring the boys out sometime. Be good for them to get to see nature, a little, something more than a park. So that’s my offer. Part-time membership in whatever little thing you have going on.”

Britta said, “I’ll take you whatever way I can get you.”

*

Shirley’s pies were good enough that Britta and Annie mostly stopped baking. Shirley basked in their praise enough that she could be coaxed into making enough for a whole week and Britta got used to dancing around on the cold floor, her bare feet lightly touching on and off, waiting for banana bread to reheat first thing in the morning, while Annie sat at the table, rubbed her eyes, and asked why Britta didn’t just buy bedroom slippers.

At first the only thing Shirley did was explain baking to them—patiently enough, if they were paying attention, and not at all if they weren’t. Brown or black bananas for banana bread. Chocolate chips. Walnuts, crushed into jagged chunks. Jeff gained three pounds and disappeared for two months, pawning off the farm’s legal consultations to some dickweed named Alan, but the end of that came when Alan called Shirley a housewife and she poured sugar in his gas tank.

Jeff came back the next week. “I told him the thing about the jukebox was way too specific to have been made up,” he said, bemused, and Shirley said she appreciated a man who understood the right way to fear a woman.

Britta said, hopefully, “I’m afraid of you too,” and Shirley started doing more.

She worked with Jeff to ditch their non-profit status and incorporate the farm’s business. She made Britta change the name because no one in their right mind would want to buy homemade pies from “a bunch of dirty hippies, probably out to destroy the government, probably not getting things shipped out on time.” Britta caved. Continued to grow weed on a little patch only she knew about.

Shirley gave her bedroom slippers for Christmas. They had little hammers and sickles embroidered on the toes.

So Britta danced around in those in the mornings instead. She even, to her horror, developed a taste for Shirley’s favorite hymns, which she rationalized as mostly being sung by black artists and therefore still within the realm of cool.

*

Three people wasn’t enough for a non-profit, but they weren’t a non-profit anymore, so Britta relaxed, grew mums, grew weed, grew strawberries, grew soybeans, considered sleeping with Jeff, who was around more often than he wasn’t, these days.

Money appeared in their bank account every month. Jeff said Pierce Hawthorne had mostly forgotten they existed, because women who agreed to live in the middle of nowhere were obviously lesbians. _Ugly_ lesbians. Jeff kept him signing the checks, though, and increased their freedom to use the land allocated to them. Britta daydreamed about a greenhouse.

Her hair was blonde. She didn’t remember the last time she’d worn makeup, a habit Annie had also eschewed, although one Shirley had kept. She said no one had ever told her that she was pretty and that was all she was. She said no one had ever, really, let her be pretty at all. Britta decided this was one of those times to not choose what was important to somebody else and just said, “I think you’re pretty.”

She thought they all were. Pierce Hawthorne didn’t know what he was missing.

*

They had been on the farm for five years when Abed Nadir turned up with Troy Barnes, his “cameraman,” heavily air-quoted because Abed turned out to be too much of a control freak to give up the camera half the time and because Britta caught them making out in the barn. They wanted to make a documentary about the collective.

“Small farms like this mostly died out around the sixties,” Abed said, scrutinizing everything in the room. “Or they went on, but they limped, with aging members. Or they were cults. You have a lot of Christianity-related paraphernalia, but nothing out of the ordinary. And none of you have gray hair. It could be interesting. Looking at where people go to find themselves, on the fringes of society. It won’t sell, but it might play Cannes. Toronto.”

“I think we went to high school together,” Troy said, after five straight minutes of staring at Annie.

She lifted her chin.

“Yeah,” she said, like the word was a glove she was going to use to slap him. “We did.”

“Cool,” he said. “I’m working with Abed now. We’re filmmakers. And I fix air conditioners. But farming’s really cool, do you have a tractor?”

“A little one,” Annie said cautiously.

Troy smiled. He had an absolutely beautiful smile, and Britta understood how two people in the room with her had fallen in love with him. “Cool.”

“A documentary would help promote the website,” Shirley said cautiously. “There isn’t a lot of crossover between people who like documentaries and people who buy baked goods, that’s an untapped market.”

“Hipsters,” Jeff said with a snort. He looked at Abed. “They’ll have to sign release forms.”

“Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything less. But they don’t have automatic control over the story I tell, just over their own actions. Which is the story.”

“It might be nice to have people know about what we’re doing here,” Annie said. “Then they could follow in our footsteps, if they wanted. We could be an example.”

Britta wondered when she’d lost control of her own commune and decided it was the downside of anarchy, that other voices might surface, that you might end up feeling overwhelmed and crowded, but that it might be a load off, something surprisingly comfortable, to only be one among many. They all signed the release forms.

Abed made the movie and then, subsequently, an offer on the barn, to convert it into a studio. Britta couldn’t go in it anymore without getting a little turned on, thinking of the straw sticking to the nape of Troy’s neck right between the curve of Abed’s fingers. Still, she hedged. They were supposed to be a women’s collective. But Annie and Shirley didn’t mind. Shirley was the big surprise, since Britta had told her about the making out, back when it had seemed like nothing more than an anecdote and she’d thought Abed and Troy would drift out of their lives the same way they’d drifted in.

The barn was as likely to be used for sex as editing and production, but Shirley irritatingly refused to be bothered by it.

“We’re going to have those boys over anyhow,” Shirley said, as though their lives together were preordained and there was nothing they could do about it now. Shirley’s belief in God was something Britta could mostly get over, hence all the crosses everywhere; her belief in unconditional love was _way weirder_. “They might as well have a place to be together that isn’t in my house.”

“Oh,” Britta said, “suddenly it’s _your_ house.”

“Our house,” Annie said, beaming.

“Technically,” Jeff said, “it’s Pierce Hawthorne’s house.”

“Do you _ever even go home anymore_?” Britta said. “Fine. Fine. We sign the agreement. We give up on all our dreams,” and she signed it, and somehow slept pretty soundly anyway, which pissed her off, so she woke up and angrily ate Shirley’s French toast while Jordan and Elijah played basketball against the side of the house— _thump-thump, thump-thump_ —and Annie drank hot chocolate and researched growing medical marijuana. (She’d discovered Britta’s cash crop earlier that week and had been glaring daggers at her ever since, footage Abed had thankfully never contextualized.) Jeff drifted in, mussed and bleary-eyed, rubbing his neck from the rock-hard pillow in the spare room. Troy and Abed held hands underneath the table and Shirley either pretended it didn’t bother her or pretended that it did, and Britta wasn’t sure which, and she also wasn’t sure when her hippie-hipster commune for women had become something as completely uncool as a family.

She smiled.

As a side-dish to the French toast, she ate some of the strawberries she’d grown. In Abed’s movie, they had looked lusciously, impossibly red, and as she bit into them, she thought she could taste that color. That life.


End file.
